


Argentum

by FleshDust



Category: Laid to Rest
Genre: Angst, Blood, Blood and Gore, Cutting, Dark, Disturbing Themes, Explicit Language, F/M, Imprisonment, Knives, Loss of Virginity, Masks, Masochism, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misogyny, Murder, Pain, Painful Sex, Physical Abuse, Sadism, Serial Killers, Torture, Twisted, Vaginal Fingering, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-03-31 00:59:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3958492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FleshDust/pseuds/FleshDust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He hadn't even planned on kidnapping his latest victim. She was so plain, so boring; utterly disposable. The possibility of someone liking the pain he could inflict never even crossed his mind. As he keeps her prisoner, he realizes that his blades summon far more depraved things from her than just blood. It awakens twisted things in them both...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story from an obscure fandom that I once posted on another site and under another handle. The time has come to rework it a bit, and as such, I decided to post it here. Please know that I do not own anything associated with the Laid To Rest franchise, and my intentions are not to infringe on any copyrights and/or trademarks. No money is being made off this story, it is for entertainment purposes only.
> 
>  **PLEASE NOTE** that this story is potentially upsetting and/or disturbing. If you've seen Laid to Rest and know the nature of our friend Chromeskull, you can probably imagine that this won't be all that pretty, except to twisted minds like yours truly. Should you like a peek at our gentleman, copy and paste: http://i.imgur.com/Kf4HH0e.jpg

_The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure._  
  
\- Marquis De Sade

  


 

 

Sawdust. 

The smell of sawdust. 

A slight tickle of it around her nose, the small particles clinging to minute hairs on her pallid face, teasing until they elicited an annoyed snort from her. The smell of the wood reminded her of a time when she had been seven years old, and her parents had remodeled the kitchen to feature new oak cabinets. 

"The oak came from England," her mother had told her proudly, and she had looked up at the gleaming, tawny wood, the cabinetry impossibly tall and towering.  
Her mother had suggested that they have a grilled cheese sandwich in their new kitchen, and so they did. It had been a good day. Her father had tucked her in at bedtime, read her a story, and the slight smell of sawdust had crept into her dreams, and the dreams were good.

But before she even opened her eyes, the deep catacombs of her brain somehow knew that this time, the smell of sawdust was not a pleasant thing. And when she did open her eyes, all that greeted her was darkness. A slight variation in the dark above her caught her confused stare as she strained to discern something in the blackness. She realized that a hole had been drilled above her, in the ceiling of this... _box_. A dim circlet of light around the edges of the hole allowed her just enough information to realize that the indifferent, cold stare of a camera lens was fixed on her. But wasn't until she felt the cool, slick brush of satin against her cheek that she realized what the box she was in might actually be.  
  
The smell of sawdust, once a pleasant memory, transformed into a wood-scented reek of horror as it surged dryly into her airways. Unadulterated dread snared her stomach and coiled there like a fat, pale worm, swelling and forcing a tormented wail out of her lungs that tasted of bile. 

She didn't realize that someone was working the lid open until small rays of light hit her tear-slickened face and eased the panic that was twining around her threadbare spine. When the lid finally ascended she felt perversely grateful, not thinking about who put her in the coffin or why. She tumbled out of it, flailing blindly and sobbing. The panic in the pit of her stomach culminated and forced a cascade of vomit out of her throat. She managed to scramble onto her hands and knees as she retched and the room spun around her.   
  
When the worst of it subsided, she recognized that the crunching under her palms was a layer of golden straw that had slowly started to soak up her sick. Gagging for a few more moments and producing only acidity in her mouth, she realized that her stomach had disposed of anything it could spare at this point. The cold, claustrophobic horror of her imprisonment had abated a bit, and as it did so, her logical brain started to function slightly again. But it wasn't until a few more moments had flitted by that she realized that her actual situation might be far worse than simple imprisonment in the satin-laced coffin. 

And when she turned her stained face upwards, she saw an impossibly tall, dark ghoul of a man above her, clothed in black. A confusing, miniscule red speck of light about his shoulder area irritated her eyes, but as her eyes allowed a bit more focus, she realized that it was a video camera. His face was obscured by a mask in the shape of a silvery skull, it's shiny teeth twisted into something that, to her, looked like the sadistic smile of misfortune.

 

* * *

 

He looked down on his latest quarry where she hovered over a puddle of her own vomit, staring up at him in utter confusion. Looking at her, he was rather disappointed, wondering why the fuck he had even bothered to snatch this one up. He had already butchered no less than two piggies the day before, their bodies now nicely splayed in his little sanctum. However, this little piggy was so far from his usual prey. So plain, so boring, so... _unpiggy_ -like. She was one of the unremarkable ones that would usually pass well below his radar when he was trawling for piggies. It had been an impulse, really, to snatch her. 

He had scooped her up in a small town as he headed towards south Florida. It was actually farther south than he usually traveled, but he had decided to drive on for the hell of it after staking out a buxom quarry in Miami who would be joining his abattoir soon. She was a prostitute too, something that would guarantee an easy capture as long as he flashed some bills in her overly painted, cocksucking face. The whores were the easiest ones. And they were the ones who needed his... _purification_... the most. The darkness that nested inside of him often whispered of the whores, the whores, how they _needed_ it.

And the hooker in Miami was planned. You could never plan enough, really. Careful planning yielded control. Only control would enable him to continue his purifications without the meddling of those who felt that his work was somehow unacceptable. They did not really see these whore-pigs. All they saw was the painted faces that somehow, should deserve human status even as they sold their soiled cunts for coin. Some of them didn't even sell, but opened their legs to any dicks that happened by. That was almost worse. 

Capturing the unpiggy-like thing at his feet was not a part of his usual, meticulous policy. In snatching her he had relinquished some control. The dark force within him that craved the blood of the whore pigs was displeased with this one, but nevertheless, it yearned to see and feel her flesh as it was carved. He was all too eager to please that yearning. The sordid bitches that were his usual quarry deserved nothing else in life than the flash of his blades as they slid across their throats, opening red smiles from ear to ear, smiles more true and honest than anything else in their apocryphal lives.   
  
The lovely maroon cascade that followed after the cutting always granted him a feeling of joy. They would die, gurgling, terrified and somehow surprised that there was no _deus ex machina_. Like they didn't quite believe that this was it. But it always was. It pleased him that they always died with that baffled look on their faces as they realized their own mortality. And when they were opened with their sleek, red insides displayed, they were more beautiful and pure than ever. He always succeeded in cutting the filth out of them, and he firmly believed that if they had been able, they would have thanked him for their newfound purity.

He studied the girl at his feet again. Her hazel eyes were wide, plastered to the chrome face he wore. Her unpainted face was pale, and her cheeks were dappled with a handful of freckles. Her stature was short, far shorter than him; her body small and rounded about the hips, clothed with a common pair of cheap, dark gray jeans and an olive green shirt. Her shoulder-length hair, a mousy brown color, was uneven and tousled about her head like a crow's nest.

The video camera on his shoulder gave a faint whirring sound, as if prompting action, begging him to turn the piggy at his feet into an exquisite, rotting display to join the others in his unhinged sanctuary. When her insides were out, she would be clean, and he wouldn't have to fret about his failure to plan. He straightened his suit, and the dark thing inside of him purred about blood, screams, blades slicing through quivering flesh and hitting bone; about whores pissing themselves as they were cut. It was just as well, he decided, seamlessly drawing his beloved blades from their sheaths behind his back.

He had heard somewhere that variety was the spice of life. The fact that he hadn't planned this one disturbed him, but of course, one needed to always make the best out of every situation. He would simply make quick work of it and display her postmortem purity. It wouldn't take too long. She had been easily acquired, and she would be easily disposed of. He noted that horror bloomed on her face when the shiny blades became visible, making her pallor even more pronounced.  
  
Their terror was sweet. He always imagined that he could smell it, taste it; the tangy flavor embedding itself into his tongue and forcing a few droplets of saliva to trickle down his chin until they were arrested by the edge of his mask. He tossed his head to the side a few times, rolling his neck, the ligaments within it popping in a most satisfying manner. With his blades menacingly poised, he started to approach her slowly. When she started to scream, the marrow in his bones writhed with obscene delight.

 

* * *

 

_The oak came from England! Mama! England, Mama!_

Her brain was bellowing useless, random absurdities that were less than useless in her precarious situation. Her throat uttered incoherent, raw groans of fear that she hardly recognized as her own. The silvery skull was coming for her. The skull with the blades, _oh God_ , those blades, ready to dig into her defenseless flesh, steel against bone, gushing warm dark blood, blade grinding into her gut, snaring her intestines; pulling them out of her belly while she still watched, splatters of her own blood and stomach acid burning on her pale lips before she died.

She managed to scramble up briefly, but her legs had been reduced to a pair of useless, lame poles of meat. It mattered little, because as soon as she managed to get up, he was upon her. A gloved, black fist whistled towards her. He backhanded her roughly, sending her sprawling to the floor among coffin splinters and moist straw. The snap of his gloved hand, the brief scent of black rubber and the sheer pain of his strike was terrifying. 

_He_ was terrifying. 

The pain around her nose told her that he had cuffed her pretty good, flooding her mouth with the iron taste of blood. Her head was swimming and her brain was reverberating from the force of his blow. Then, the flash of a jagged blade briefly obscured her vision and for one absurd second, her brain told her how beautiful the luster of the steel was.  
  
The skull settled on her, his large, heavy body straddling her hips and his free gloved hand creeping under her chin. His touch was obscenely gentle on the face he had very nearly mangled just a moment ago. She could have sworn that the chrome of his mask was grinning at her, twinkling with the joy of unmistakable cruelty.

She groaned with fear when the blade neatly cut her shirt right down the middle, like a letter opener slicing an envelope. With a practiced hand, her captor peeled back the halves of the garment with the tip of his deadly blade. The cold steel touched her, almost lovingly. She thought that she could hear the strange rippling sound of it scraping against her pale flesh as its shiny tip caught the goosebumps that had raised on her skin.

 

* * *

 

_Here, piggy, pig, pig..._

The fear was culminating now. He could sense it in her. It was cresting, like a rogue wave or an orgasm finally coaxed out of the body of a disease-ridden doxy. Her eyes looked like they might just flee their sockets, something that, when he thought about it, was vastly amusing. Like the cartoons. The blood that trickled out of her nose was a rather appealing contrast to the pallor of her skin. It was time to show her the fundamental purity of pain before she joined his menagerie of torn flesh.

She trembled beneath him, her hips radiating quivering fear up into his body where he sat astride her. It made him sigh deeply with atrocious satisfaction. He could feel the dark thing within him squirm gleefully as he slowly placed the sharp blade in between her small breasts.


	2. Chapter 2

The chill of the blade where it rested between her vulnerable breasts, a precursor to what was coming, was nearly enough to crush her already dubious sanity. Hovering over her, the silvery skull tilted his head to the side and sniffed audibly before altering the angle of his wrist meticulously. And she realized that the cutting would start momentarily. The hairs at the back of her neck reached skywards and her insides convulsed.  
  
Pain and heat sliced through her being as the blade slowly slid down her chest, leaving a thin, red track in its wake. She sang out the agony that assaulted her body, writhing and pleading incoherently as her captor stroked her with the gorgeous, deadly steel.

* * *

Her reaction was greatly satisfying to him. It was hardly anything uncommon, most of the piggies whom he chose to play with in this manner reacted in a very similar way. Some of them fought him tooth and nail and some of them were reduced to blubbering piles of pathetic meat. Others simply gave up, pleading for death, which always disappointed him a bit. It wasn't as enjoyable to slowly carve the life out of someone who actually wished for death.  
  
He lifted the blade from her body then to take a look at his handiwork. A thin, red slice ran from in between her white breasts to her navel. The bleeding was minimal; he knew very well how to cut in order to prolong the purification. But before he could resume his adored task, his keen ears caught a guttural noise from one of the numerous coffins at the far end of the barn.  
  
_Ah, that's right. Blondie-pig._  
  
He had nearly forgotten the little blond bitch that he had kept alive for a few days. He had plucked her up from Boca Raton as she emerged from a night club, an establishment that, to him, was equal to a brothel due to the way these whores visited them in order to find a cock to shove between their ever-open legs. He had been lucky. The blonde had emerged alone after closing. She had started towards the parking garage across the street, and he had appeared behind her and slipped a hypodermic needle laced with tranquilizer into her neck. It had almost been erotic, really, the way the needle slipped into the flesh like it belonged there, summoning a startled gasp from the whore as her body went limp in his embrace.  
  
Grabbing her had been so ridiculously easy. It always was. State forensics detectives always liked to pretend that kidnapping and any subsequent murders were nigh impossible to get away with, but here he was, a good number of butchered piggies under his belt, tidy and neat like juicy Christmas hams. And the Florida police were as clueless as ever.  
  
He celebrated the Blondie-piggy by cutting her hair off, slicing thin layers of skin like fine prosciutto off her legs and back, and giving her some new, interesting facial features to match her atrocious, decayed soul. When he cut her nose off, she had screamed with snot and blood flowing into her mouth, and then she had passed out. He had found it greatly amusing to bind her naked, limp body to one of the decomposing corpses that rested in a coffin, forcing her to embrace the rotting carrion like she would any of the dicks she dragged home. When she came around, her horrified screams were grand.  
  
There she had laid for four days now, wailing a bit now and then, but growing quieter by the hour. He had noted just the day before that the novelty of his new experiment had grown rather stale. She was near madness now with her red, rheumy eyes bulging like those of a rabid animal. There was a ragged hole where her nose had been, crusty with dried, black blood and weeping with infection. At times, she would babble some frenzied, indecipherable nonsense when she wasn't passed out with her nasty face in the opened chest cavity of the corpse.  
  
He regarded the piggy under him for a few moments before making a decision. He was bored with the blonde whore now, and in order to work on this new piggy without disruptions, he'd silence the blondie-pig. Interruptions were quite irritating.  
  
He climbed off his living piggy with the nimbleness of a black cat. Her body was oddly limp now and she had grown quiet while the superficial lacerations on her chest wept. Her eyes were glazed, staring up at the old, wooden beams in the ceiling of the barn.  
  
He didn't bother restraining her. If she tried to book it, it would just make her a little less unremarkable, and there would be a bit of spice added to the whole thing. Allowing the flesh underneath his mask a small smile, he found himself almost hoping that she would try to flee.

* * *

She didn't flee. Her mind did howl about escape, running, getting away now, _now_ , before it was too late, but something kept her from trying. In fact, she hardly moved from where she lay, steeped in a queer kind of confusion.  
  
It wasn't the fear or even the pain that had rendered her completely dull-minded and shocked. The cuts on her chest throbbed in a way that worried her. In spite of her wailing and the sick horror she felt about her captor, her realization that his blades were eliciting queer, warm reactions in the pit of her stomach was far more horrifying than anything else up to that point. The initial pain had been jarring, and her brain had acted accordingly. But the more he cut her in that precise, fluid way, the more she had noticed that the pain he inflicted upon her was abnormally pleasant. Something disturbing had stirred in some secret, corrupted corner of her mind, keeping her from even trying to run.  
  
_Something's really, really fucking wrong._  
  
The slicing, feeling her flesh opened to the chilly air with her nerve ends ablaze, was quite different from anything she had ever felt before.  
  
It felt... _alive_. Perversely dynamic. She had had fillings done before, sliced her finger open while chopping garlic, even dislocated a shoulder once. Things that brought pain, and the primal desire to get rid of the sensation. But the pain she had felt then as compared to what he had inflicted on her was simply not even in the same spectrum. It lay outside of it, far beyond it, looming in the darkness like the most arcane of forbidden sins, a depraved animal promising macabre delights of a kind that very few knew. That very few ever _wished_ to know.  
  
_God forgive me, I want more._  
  
She didn't know where he had gone and she hadn't heard the faint moaning that had interrupted his ministrations. But she knew that she felt bizarrely disappointed. Her skin seemed to squirm in response when she heard him approaching her again.

* * *

He really disliked to be interrupted. But he had handled it swiftly, nearly cutting the whore's head off, watching her blond hair soak with blood as he savagely carved her neck until he felt the jagged teeth of the knife crunch against her spinal cord, almost severing it. A gurgle, a droll spasm, then the whore was gone. Finally pure.  
  
A few droplets of briny sweat had appeared on his clean-shaven head.  
  
He returned to the new piggy to resume his task, pondering to make it quicker than he used to simply to get her out of the way and return to his plans and not deviate from them, ever again.  
But when he returned to her, something odd greeted him. She laid in the exact same position that he had left her, conscious and seemingly fully lucid. Her hazel eyes watched him intently. Her gaze was full of fear, but steady. The tears she had shed had dried into salty tracks on her ashen cheeks.  
  
_Strange._  
  
He knelt down to continue. When the blade touched her flesh again, she gave a sigh that made him flinch. It stirred something within him that had been hibernating for a long, long time. He felt a faint spasm in his loins. It startled him a bit—he had nearly forgotten that such a thing existed. He did not frolic with his whore-pigs in that way. Their naked forms filled him with revulsion, and the only time he could have imagined touching their naked flesh was when they were pure and peeled open. But it was nothing he engaged in even when they were pure, his work was far more important and gave him pleasure beyond anything else. 

And now this unpiggy-like thing on the floor had made a noise that sounded like something he remembered from the times before he started his work. A sound generally associated with pleasureable feelings. It displeased him greatly, yet his mind grew clouded as he watched her breasts rise and fall with every frantic breath, her small rosy nipples taut from chill and terror. She made nearly inaudible versions of _that_ sound as she stared at him.  
  
When the haze in his mind and the ache in his midsection had diminished slightly, he had yanked her jeans off and discarded them a few feet away without even realizing it. As he finally fully came to his senses, her undergarments had been sliced away as well, exposing her to him fully. Her chest was heaving and her lips wet with the condensation that rapidly collected on them due to her harsh panting. 

The wounds on her chest were slithering in sync with her labored breathing. He watched them dance.

* * *

_England... oak._  
  
Her mind had grown thick and muzzy—a confusing blend of fear, panic, pain and other, darker things that she hardly dared to name bubbled in her brain. The chill in the barn caressed her body, and the feeling of exposure was nearly overwhelming as the silver skull lurched over her, perusing her nakedness. She had never felt so exposed and vulnerable. The thought that he could, and probably would, simply gut her was terrifying. But that possibility was also enthralling.  
The wounds on her chest throbbed.  
  
When he roughly yanked her legs apart, she cried out.

* * *

It was not according to plan. He was deviating, and gravely so. He didn't like it, the displeasure within him was so great that he nearly felt like carving off all of the flesh off her bones and watch her die slowly for causing him such confusion.  
She was so fucking _un-piggy_.  
  
But yet, there was something about her that prompted him to investigate further. His next action was baffling, even to himself, and certainly to the dark presence within him. It hissed with disapproval as his fingers approached the place between her pale legs, the thing that the whore-pigs used to get whatever they wanted. He ignored the dark thing and its indignation. He pressed one gloved finger into her, marveling at the fact that he was actually doing so.  
  
He felt resistance within her, not truly realizing at first what it meant. When he pushed his finger in farther, something seemed to give way and the female cried out loudly with obvious discomfort, clutching the straw at her sides. But she did not stop him, nor did she attempt to close her legs, rather, she dug her heels deeper into the substrate. Experimentally, he removed his finger and wiped it on the soft skin of her abdomen. Red smeared her skin, and he realized what this was.  
  
She had never been fucked.  
He did not notice that his breathing quickened and a shudder crawled down his spine. Behind his true chrome face, he licked his lips and exhaled forcefully. He placed his beautiful, trusty blade at her throat.

* * *

The first finger made her gasp, bringing a burning sting to her untouched flesh. She moaned quietly, the sound filled with fear. Feeling his ministrations and then the sudden stab of discomfort told her that he had broken through her virginity. The rubber of his gloves was warm and wet as he smeared her blood on her lower abdomen. The whole episode was strange. She realized that she should feel despair, shame, and anger at her violation. But there was nothing. In truth, she had never really given her virginity all that much thought. Males had never really been all that interested in her, so the opportunity to get it fucked out of her had not arisen. It was nothing that she really lamented, since she preferred to keep to herself. 

But now the silvery skull had deflowered her, and she felt morbid excitement at the fact. She did not know why, but knowing that he had made her bleed again thrilled her. Her lower regions still throbbed with the pain, but like his cutting, she found herself relishing it. She tensed with fear and anticipation when the skull moved, approaching her with knife in hand.  
When the jagged edge of his blade came to push against her throat, a swirling sensation of sick, burning heat swelled between her pale legs. A moan escaped her as he thrust a finger into her again.  
  
A second finger pushed into her, and her moans grew a bit louder.  
  
By the time his third digit carved into her, she was groaning with pain. Gasping puffs of air emerged from her when he started to move his hand, slowly fucking her innocence with his gloved fingers; the black latex becoming coated with more of her blood and the lubricant her body was desperately trying to provide to minimize actual damage.  
  
He continued like that for a while with his other hand still clutching the handle of the knife, its shiny blade adamantly stationed at her throat. Her small breasts quivered when he altered the pace, pulling his fingers out slowly but thrusting them back in with all the more force. She started to sob with the pain, but did nothing to stop him, even though her arms were completely unrestrained. Her hands simply fisted the straw that littered the floor, her knuckles turning white when he shoved his fingers especially deep into her.

* * *

He cocked his head, watching her face contort with agony, watching how precariously the teeth of his blade dug into the white column of her throat. She was rather beautiful when she was broken, bloody and weeping. He hadn't seen beauty in a uncarved female in as long as he could remember. The darkness grudgingly agreed that yes, she was not quite as disgusting as the whore-pigs. Her hoarse cries of pain and the fact that her innocence now belonged to him and the darkness pleased them both.  
  
Without any warning, he withdrew his fingers from her flesh, the tender, pink folds now stained with scarlet. He moved to straddle her chest.  
  
_Cut more._  
  
Slowly, deliberately, he shifted the knife away from her throat. Moving lower on her body, he placed the blade underneath her left breast. When he allowed it to travel down and inwards towards her abdomen to join with the vertical cut he had left there earlier, she let out a deep moan that sounded nothing like he had heard from any human before. Her eyes became oddly hazy again, her lids drooping to half mast. She was sinking into that strange state that seemed to resemble a type of catatonic pleasure, her enjoyment seemingly increasing when he took the blade to her. It was all too outlandish; he had hurt her quite a bit, and still there was not one sound of protest. He moved off her, perplexed, and when he did so, she snapped out of the strange, trance-like state she had sunken into ever since he had taken the blade to her.  
  
"Oh God," she moaned thickly, "Please... hurt me... hurt me more."  
  
Her small white hand closed around his black-clad wrist before he could withdraw. Her short fingernails, once painted dark blue but the polish now nearly peeled off, dug into his forearm.  
  
"Hurt me _more_ ," she entreated again, sounding desperate.  
  
Like she really wanted him to.  
  
He snatched his wrist out of her grasp, and the darkness within him surged with excitement, telling him to kill this thing now, _now_ , carve her open before she could cause more consternation in them both. He hovered over her for a few moments, his blade poised to strike. He truly loathed indecision. And this was not part of the plan. And it wasn't how piggies were supposed to act.  
  
He had backhanded her, cut her and violated her precious little cunt, and still, she fucking begged for more. For once, the dark thing inside of him remained quiet, seemingly as dumbfounded and unsure as he was. There was supposed to begging. Pleading to stay alive. _Not_ a desperate request for more agony. It was all too disconcerting, too infuriating.

Silent as the grave, he hauled her off the floor and dragged her to the back of the barn, where an old box stall waited for her, the smell of the animal that had last inhabited it still hanging in the air. She was as silent as he was, even though thin trickles of scarlet slid down her stomach. He hurled her into the pen with such force that she hit the opposing wall, her body slumping into the rotting straw with a thud.  
When he secured the gate with an old, rusty padlock, he felt like screaming.


	3. Chapter 3

_Two days._

She had been imprisoned in the paddock for two days. The only way she could really calculate that fact was due to a small window in the paddock that tattled of the shifts of day and night. The window was barred, and a white film covered it like a cloudy cataract. She hadn't even tried to test the window to see if it could offer a means of escape. Thought about it a few times, yes, but the thoughts were more of a way to appease her sense of moral duty than a wish to actually escape. She felt like she should at least _think_ about it, once or twice, to satisfy the vague obligation of _trying_. These thoughts came after she had realized that she did not really want to go anywhere. And she knew why, the reason utterly unequivocal in her brain, no matter how much logic tried to thwart it.

The silvery skull had approached her a handful of times, but most of them were only to deftly slip a needle into her flesh. A tiny bite of a stainless steel proboscis. An inevitable dumb stupor followed as a soupy kind of fog settled on her world. The skull would hold her until she was snoozing before he did what he had planned. Upon waking after he had drugged her the first time, she realized that he had cleaned her wounds meticulously, even closing some with medical tape. The skin around her cuts had a maroon-brown tint to them, telling her that he had cleaned them with Betadine.

She had been washed during another slight narcosis; a washcloth dripping with warm water scrubbing her skin. Other times she was so completely out of it that she didn't know what was done. Sometimes, he'd approach the barred gate without drugging her, simply pushing whatever it was he thought that she needed through the bars. Something to eat, something to drink; a too-large, black t-shirt that had once featured the logo of some company, but the cheap yellow print had long since flaked into unreadability. Once he chucked her an orange through the bars, the round fruit hitting her square in the temple. She had eaten it, along with other edibles that he gave her, but simply because she knew that her body needed sustenance. Hunger simply seemed rather unimportant in her current reality.

Her thoughts never wandered far from his blades and from the fact that every time he approached, she hoped that he would brandish them again. Death loomed in the stall with her, she knew, its bitter breath on the back of her neck every time the silvery skull neared. Even this seemed inconsequential. Like an addict she craved the substance that brought her beyond intoxication, but in her case, no chemical could rival the effect of something as common as cold, sharp steel.

With nothing else to occupy her time, she had taken to scratching the healing scabs on her wounds. She soon noticed that picking at the black little crusts was satisfying in a way that she could not describe even if she had tried.

She was doing it again; sighing happily every time a small bead of blood formed when she had managed to scrape another one off. A soft noise interrupted her ministrations. Looking up, she gasped, the scab that she was currently worrying forgotten. Her captor had appeared outside the stall, watching her through the bars of the upper section of the gate, the black, dead eye sockets of the mask trained upon her and the red speck of the camera in its place by his shoulder. Within moments, he was in there with her, plunging a hypodermic needle into her neck before she could even react.

A few gurgling noises stumbled out of her mouth, akin to the mumblings of an aged, gaptoothed drunk. It wasn't even like she fully knew what she was trying to say. Whatever he had injected into her was stronger than usual, and it quickly smothered her vision with a kind of balmy darkness.

* * *

He regarded her where she lay on her side in the straw, clothed in the old shirt he had given her. The drug worked fast. Her eyes had fluttered and a few garbled noises had emerged from her before it knocked her out.

It would be easy to just kill her while she was stoned on his potent cocktail of painkillers. Not a bit entertaining, granted, but at least she would be out of the way and not able to disrupt his plans with her un-piggyesque presence. If he dispatched her now, she wouldn't be able to utter those obscene moans of delight when he knifed her.

Her deep groans of enjoyment and her appeals for more of the same had haunted him these past two days. Indecision was driving him quite mad, but he had, at least, resolved to feed and clean her while he grappled with this dilemma. He rarely had to wonder what the darkness had to say about it. It had been pestering him nearly all the time about her, and how she needed to be purified.

He straddled her hip slowly then, not bothering to turn her onto her back.

He _had to_ try. The dark thing inside of him surged, bellowing its approval.

Within a few seconds, the jagged blade came down towards the pale body in a shining arc.

But it stopped just shy of her head, yearning to pierce her temple and hear it crunch; sinking into the softness of the brain inside, ending her, and _his_ suffering.

The blade wouldn't travel further than a fraction of an inch away from her skull. The darkness howled with pure rage, spitting invective.

However, for the first time since the darkness had awakened inside of him (he knew that he had been born with it slumbering in his mind), he detected very slight hesitation on its part. It wasn't as sure anymore. He probed at it for a few minutes, concentrating on the aspects of her that intrigued him. The dark thing grumbled sourly about butchery, but he could feel that while it would always want her sliced open, she was not as loathsome as their usual fare. Additionally, it finally did have to admit that she could _not_ be a whore-pig, since she had been untouched until they clawed her innocence out of her. He left the darkness to its griping for now, and turned his attention back to the unconscious female.

The soft roundness of her hip rested against his black-clad crotch, the heat of her sleeping body permeating the cool, black fabric. The warmth reached his loins, stirring the same forgotten feeling there that he had felt the first day.

With the knife still in his hand, he placed his gloved hands at her waist, clutching it. Experimentally, he slowly and firmly allowed his loins to grind against the roundness of her hips for a few moments. This action intensified the stirrings in his groin exponentially; the strong feeling it summoned in his midsection was shocking and long since buried under layers of his enraged bloodlust. The twitches of sensation that he had felt before this were minor in comparison.

He gave a low, deep growl of frustration from behind his chrome mask, accidentally nicking the skin at her waist as he clutched it with blade in hand. The lovely scarlet and the faint, coppery scent of her blood, the memory of her pleads and the feeling in his groin was nearly too much for him to handle.

_Bloodlust._

_Blood._

_Lust._

Suddenly, he leapt off her as if her inert form had burned him. The darkness arose in him again like a starved animal, its earlier doubts forgotten as it howled for her life's blood. Enraged, he ignored it and stalked out of the stall. He slammed it shut, his gloved fingers not nearly as adroit as usual as he fumbled with the rusted lock.

There was a live piggy whore that he had captured the other day, one that had been planned. _Oh yes._ She would get it, and she would react like she was supposed to. She would pay for this confusion. The darkness allowed itself to be distracted from the unpig when actual purification was imminent.

Control was gradually returning to him with every step that he took from box stall. The feeling of regaining that precious sensation of control and power was almost intoxicating. The desperate, horrified whines of the whore he had captured reached his ears from where she sat, shackled to an old piece of farming equipment.

He nearly couldn't wait to slice her open from groin to breastbone, her red, torrid insides greeting him like an old friend, welling out to meet him, whispering reassurances to him about the absolute control that he once again held over his piggies.

And finally, there was no _lust_ in his mind anymore, only bloodlust.

* * *

She awoke to screams that echoed strangely in the barn. At first, she didn't know if they were her own screams or not, as it seemed entirely possible considering how drugged she had been and how volatile her captor seemed with his blades. But when her sluggish brain allowed a bit more clarity she realized that they came from the other end of the barn. They were the pleading, terrified screams of another woman.

She sat up scrupulously; her legs were wobbly and did not quite want to function. Looking down, she realized that she was still only clothed in the old shirt that he had tossed to her. Her lower body remained unclothed, something that should have been embarrassing, but she found that she did not have the will to care. She was cold though, the skin of her thighs numb and chill. A few feet away there was a strange lump in the hay, its color somewhat familiar. Creeping closer to it, she realized that it was her jeans. He had apparently chucked them into the stall at some point. Painstakingly, she wriggled into them, grateful to chase away some of the chill in her body.

" _I'm NOT a little piggy!_ "

The screams from the female had been wordless until then, and the exclamation made her jump.

The voice was filled with terror and the kind of bravery that cracked immediately when one heard the undertone of panic and wretched sobs. A sad façade of mock defiance.

Another wail came.

" _Why are you doing this to me?!_ "

It prompted her to creep over to the gate, pulling herself up to the bars to peek outside.

She could not see much, a fact that was both disappointing and relieving to her. She was able to see the hulking form of the skull behind a coffin, impossibly tall, clothed in that austere, black suit; his blades raised. She could not remember if he had used two blades on her or only one.

He was regarding something on the floor, and she assumed it was the source of the screams, even though the sleek cherry wood coffin blocked her view.

She realized that the barn held numerous coffins. Did they all have their own inhabitant?

Another pleading whine came from the female thing she could not see, the voice begging desperately for life, trying everything, trying reason, logic, sympathy. When those things had no effect, the woman-thing sobbed about how she would let him have anything he wanted, telling him that he could _fuck_ her, and she wouldn't fight him, as long as he let her go, after.

Obscenely, she felt a stab of jealousy upon hearing this.

The silvery skull lurched down to the screaming thing.

The cuts on her body started to throb again, stirring nefarious things in the cobwebbed corners of her mind where conscious thought rarely surfaced.

The howls of the woman-thing took on a new intensity then, an almost screeching quality. Wet sounds of flesh being mutilated blended with the wailing. Minute droplets of red splashed the lid of a coffin nearby. It was made out of cherrywood, beautiful and opulent, it's color and the color of the fresh blood strangely similar.

She tried to feel empathy for the female. There was none. She felt resentful that the woman-thing would taste his blades when all she could do was watch, and not even do that properly. The emotions that should have kindled compassion in her seemed oddly numb, as if blotted out by a gray, miasmic cloud.

The barn grew silent then.

A small sound distracted her momentarily, and she turned her head to the side, straining to see through the bars. There was another live one, she realized, a head of rich auburn, tan skin, and out like a light—the telltale sign of the drugs he was so fond of pumping into his victims.

But when she looked back to the main attraction, as it were, a startled gasp escaped her. She tumbled backwards into the moldy straw.

The silver skull was only inches away from the bars, regarding her with the black voids of the mask's eye sockets, still and quiet like the thing he had just carved open. Dark, sticky drops of blood clung to the elegant, sleek fabric of his suit.

As fast as last time, he was in there with her, flipping her onto her stomach and ripping her shirt asunder, the blades kissing her skin before she had time to react. Two vertical cuts were quickly cloven into the untainted skin of her back, the skin separating like silk. She mewled loudly at the demented heat that it brought to her body, setting her nerve endings ablaze, the raw, red flesh within the cuts exposed to the chill of the air; the heat of her blood and the cool air blending into a feeling of unholy hellfire.

He leaned over her then, yanking her head back by her hair, the blades no longer in his hands, replaced with a sleek, black cellphone that he shoved in front of her pale face.

The message on the display screamed at her.

**LITTLE GIRL WANTS TO HURT MORE DOES SHE ******

********

"Yes," she panted like a thirsty dog, "Oh God, yes."

He paused for a moment, keying in a new message for her perusal. The small screen soon returned to her field of vision.

**ARE YOU AFRAID**

She nodded, and his grasp on her hair tightened and he yanked her head back more, forcing her back to arch further, the skin of her back groaning with the agony. Wet, warm blood dripped into the straw.

"Yes" she gritted out weakly, "Yes... I _like_ it..."

Another message keyed in.

**I WILL SHOW YOU HOW MUCH I CAN MAKE YOU HURT**

****

**AND YOU WILL LOVE IT ******


	4. Chapter 4

She closed her eyes tightly as the skull came for her.

She could hear the redhead waking up just as the skull roughly dragged her out of the stall by her hair. Sobs and incoherent snivelling started to emerge from the redhead, the confusion in the words palpable. They failed to faze her as she allowed the skull to pull her where he wished. Her scalp crackled sharply with pain as her captor hauled her into his rotting domain.

Sad, mechanical carcasses of old farm equipment were slowly rusting away amidst the macabre display of coffins, a parody of the supposed serenity that one's final rest was supposed to be. A handful of mutilated bodies were scattered about in half-open coffins; she had not been able to see them from her vantage point in the stall. Some were unregocnizable as human. Many were missing limbs, or even heads; all of them torn open from groin to breastbone from what she could see. They seemed strangely unreal to her, as if they were simply props for a horror film. The smell of decay told her otherwise, but even that did not bother her overmuch.

By the time he slammed her down onto the lid of a closed coffin, the redhead had started to scream. The noise was shrill, wordless, the wail of someone teetering on the brink of near insane hysteria.

It seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the rotting abbatoir and the horrid agony that was sure to visit her in only a few moments.

And, _oh God..._

She could hardly wait.

* * *

Things couldn't have been more perfect when the redhead whore-pig started to scream. His little unpig was in front of him, splayed face-down on the coffin, the dark wood a marvelous contrast to the pallor of her skin. He noted that her wan complexion had started to approach the color of candle wax in the last day or so. He liked it.

The dark thing had roused with the screaming of the redhead whore. The pale form on the coffin both pleased and enraged it, but for once, it kept silent, allowing him some peace to hurt his unpig. Cocking his head, he regarded the lacerations he had applied to her back just a few moments ago. As she squirmed slightly, the cuts danced for him again.

Oh, those lovely, perfect cuts on her skin, so straight, so excellent, true art, so skillful and precise, making the unpig bleed and moan, but not killing her, _no_ , he had realized fully that this one, this one needed some more _play_ , play with knives, run with scissors, fucked with knives, _maybe_ , he didn't know for sure yet, but he knew one thing and it was that the redhead whore was screaming and the cuts on the skin of the unpig were slithering, begging for more, _begging_...

 _She_ had been begging. For more hurt. She begged so _fucking_ sweetly.

And he realized, amidst the screeches of the bitch nearby, the sticky drops of blood on his fine, custom suit, the read slashes on his unpig and her pallid face, that his cock had swelled.

It was a strange feeling, truly, to feel it surge to life like that. It was a taut, almost painful feeling. He hadn't had much use of the thing between his legs for many years, in truth, he wasn't quite sure when he used it on a whore last. He had long since started to think of such activity as trivial and truly boring when compared to the pleasure of torture and killing.

In the times before he had lost interest in such things, he had discovered early on that hurting women during mundane sexual congress was an entertaining pastime. He had also noted that his member had been widely regarded by the the bitches to be large; not only long, but apparently very thick. Many urged him to take it slow, be careful; and at first he had obeyed in order to please whatever bitch he was fucking.

It always felt fundamentally wrong, but before the darkness woke up, he always strove to fit in, be normal; show the expected interest in these bitches and pretend that you actually wanted to fuck their dirty holes. Hold their hands, talk to them and smile at their secretly rotting faces and pretend that you did not want to tear their fucking spines out. Inevitably, it came down to bedding them, since it was always expected by a male. The whole sexual act had disgusted him, but biology had allowed him to become hard and do what was expected.

He knew now that what made him start hurting the whores during was the darkness. It was slumbering, but still, whispering to him from somewhere far away, as if talking in its sleep. He had realized that his cock could be used as another gruesome weapon against the whores.

Seducing them under the pretense of mutual pleasure and then fucking their filthy cunts until they cried had been a revelation. His physical pleasure had been non-existent, but making them feel such pain made him feel incredibly good inside. The memories of those instances could elicit a pleased laughter from him anytime he recalled the pathetic weeping of the bitches. Hands batting about his chest and head, accompanied by the useless phrase of _stop, you're hurting me!_

But of course, that was all before he had discovered the gratification of the whole butchering process, as it were.

He looked down at his unpig again.

His trusty camera whirred impatiently.

And he reached for her.

* * *

A frightened moan escaped her when his hand suddenly grabbed her hair again, close to the roots, forcing her head back and her back to arch, her upper body rising slightly from the lid of the coffin where she had been laying face down. Her clammy palms slammed onto the lid to retain some leverage. The tender cuts on her back sang.

He released her hair for a moment and his gloved fingers roughly dipped under the waistband of her jeans that she had so painstakingly struggled into. They were furiously yanked down to her feet by his violent hands, seams splitting and buttons popping. Her knees were pushed apart, and she tried to feel shame about being so exposed. She was on full on display for her captor, but no shame made itself known, only anticipation and a sense of dread and desire.

A shuffling sound reached her ears, the rustling of fabric and unsnapping of buttons, and not a second later something unbelievably massive and burning hot pressed against her.

The redhead, who had been watching their exchange with wide, horrified eyes, started yowling again, her wails intensified tenfold.

His hand returned to her hair, establishing a vice-like grip, and soon a flash of steel danced before her eyes. She realized that he had drawn one of his blades, and she felt so perversely grateful at the sight of the beautiful piece of steel that she almost wept. Her nipples pebbled stiffly from more than just the chill of the barn.

The knife crept around her, it's unforgiving teeth sinking into the sensitive, white skin of her throat, creating a chokehold of pain.

And then he yanked her head back with his other hand, the serrated blade threatening to chew into her trachea. His hips bucked forward and he thrust his full length into her, causing her to expel all the air from her lungs in a long, hoarse cry. She could feel skin and musles tear as he filled her. His cock started to stab into her greedily, breaking her open, hot, horribly thick, agonizing, invading; forcing her burning flesh open for him, and she loved it. Tears of agony flooded her cheeks and she felt like his cock was ripping bits of flesh from her insides.

She screamed then, a tormented, extended sound that ended in a hoarse moan.

The agony that she had begged for was in full bloom as he invaded her with his monstrous flesh, the cock cleaving her tight passage open for him, blood starting to flow from in between her white thighs and down his pale shaft, painting the straw on the floor with small red splashes like flowers.

His thrusts became far more violent after the initial few. He started a steady, hard rhythm that consisted of an agonizingly violent series of thrusts that drove his cock into her to the hilt and made her insides feel like they were pushed farther up into her body.

He fucked her for a long time then until she felt raw and torn and damaged, the jagged side of the blade still at her throat, the serrated teeth half an inch in the vulnerable flesh, the low growls of the silver skull behind her. She teetered on the brink of passing out, were it not for his unrelenting, hard cock that kept working into her.

Then her head was yanked back, his hand fisting her hair furiously, and before she knew it, a spectacular burst of pain like a brilliant supernova exploded from her left hip.

When she realized that he had stabbed her, she came hard. Her tainted body convulsed as the harsh scraping of steel against her hip bone helped spiral her into a deranged abyss of excruciating pleasure-pain. Before the frantic throbbing of her nether regions had tapered off, her captor climaxed, a low, gritted growl escaping from behind the leering silver skull as he ground into her to the hilt, his thick, hot liquid saturating her torn flesh.

He withdrew, and she gave a feeble moan as his horrid, white flesh left her. The blade slid out of her hip then, weeping exquisite streaks of scarlet, and she felt like a lover bereft of the intimacy of what some called afterglow.

Unconsciousness claimed her before she could think much else, the hazy darkness enveloping her like a strange, dead shroud. Her abused body went slack in the cruel embrace of her captor.

* * *

He studied his unpig for a few moments before closing the stall gate again. He had tidied her up a bit, cleaned her wounds and admired the lovely, deep stab that had seemingly sent them both over the edge. He had stitched it together, rather haphazardly, but well enough to stop the bleeding. Dark, congealing blood was drying in between the small catgut stitches.

A string of red cuts crowned the column of her throat now, the trickles of blood arrested by the hydrogen peroxide he had used on her cuts.

He glanced at the place between her legs. The flesh, once a pink color, was now a bright red that matched the cuts on her body. When he had cleaned her there, his seed had trickled out of her, streaked scarlet with her blood. It had pleased him. The darkness had been silent during their tryst.

He decided to dress her again to keep her from getting too chilled. Her small body was light and pliable as he moved her limbs about in order to clothe her.

She had been hot and tight, her narrow passage frantically clenching around his hard flesh. And no matter how much he hurt her, she seemingly enjoyed it on an intimate level that he almost envied.

Such a strange little unpig. So married to the pain.

Such a little rarity.

But he knew that she could not stay much longer. There was work to be done. The dark thing within him had allowed him this little deviation, allowed him to enjoy his unpig however he wished, knowing that he could not be swayed where she was concerned. But now, he knew, he owed filthy blood again, like the blood of the whimpering redhead bitch in the corner of the barn.

He would contemplate the fate of his unpig while the redhead was given the purification that she so sorely needed.

Perhaps inspiration would strike.


	5. Chapter 5

White lights, invasive and horribly bright, were burning through the thin veneer of her eyelids where she laid, prone on her back and wrapped in crisp fabrics that smelled like nothing. She tried to screw her eyes shut tighter when she became aware of the light— _too bright!_ —but her eyelids might have been made of onion skin for all the good that did her. There were peculiar, garbled sounds in this blinding fog. She attempted to open her eyelids to see the source of the funny noises. Slowly she cracked her lids, but the first slit of light into her eyes was so unpleasant that she closed them again.

The muffled sounds started to float together into something she recognized. They were words. At first, she could not comprehend them. But after a few moments, she could pick out little specks of familiar sounds here and there. Before too long, there were sentences, still warped, but clear enough for her to decipher them. The sounds were not close to her, but not too far away, either. It struck her that these were humans, talking. Hearing a human voice that was not screaming was utterly queer.

"... raped and tortured for _days_. He cut her up pretty badly, officers. Nothing life-threatening, but she'll be scarred for the rest of her life. And not _only_ physically."

It was a mild female voice, melodical, but with a slight rough edge. It was sprinkled with concern, but also an apparent tone of annoyance directed at whomever she was conversing with.

"How long has she been out?" came another voice, male this time. It was a fairly generic, masculine baritone, and would have been rather pleasant had it not been for a deep, Southern drawl that tainted it. The tone was demanding.

"Thirty-three hours, now," replied the female voice, "Even when she comes out of it, you may _not_ question her right away. The well-being of my patient comes first..."

"Hold on a minute, now!" the drawler interrupted. The Southern twang distorted the last word into a parody of itself. _Neeow_.

"She's the only one who has survived _him_ as far as we know, she has to be questioned..." he continued, but was cut off by the irate female voice, his attempt at authority shriveled.

"That may be, Officer Cameron, but I will _not_ allow it until she is well enough. She's had enough trauma without law enforcement forcing her to relive it the second she wakes up. I will notify you when I feel that she has recovered sufficiently. Should you disagree, you may have your superiors contact me, and I will tell them the same thing."

There was audible grumbling between Officer Cameron and another male voice, likely his partner. The one called Cameron uttered a sarcastic 'thank you, ma'am', his Southern diction thick with exasperation and insult. The other officer, his voice soft and sounding very tired, thanked the female much more politely. Two sets of heavy footsteps departed. A snort full of disdain emerged from the woman.

A light padding sound told her that the female doctor was drawing near, her padded shoes making tiny squaks against the linoleum. There was a soft shuffling at her side.

Her eyes rolled back from where they had been hiding in her head, trying to focus as her eyelids fluttered. She managed to open her eyelids, the small slit enough to allow the white, sterile light to assault her corneas again. She raised her hands, shielding herself from the light.

"Too _much_... too... the light," she muttered, her voice discordant and feeble. The garish brightness was quickly dimmed to more tolerable levels. Then the doctor spoke to her.

"There we go, is that better? Welcome back, honey." Her voice was soft and caring, and for a moment, it made her want to weep. "You've been out for quite some time."

Her eyes finally adjusted and opened, and she blinked with the memory of the offending brightness. Little spots of it still danced in her field of vision, but the dimmed lights of the hospital room were soothing. Disorientation and vertigo made her head spin, but she forced herself to look up at the owner of the female voice. Above her stood a tall, dark woman, a tumble of jet black curls hanging over her shoulder and a careful, concerned smile on her coffee-colored lips.

Her white lab coat was embroidered with _**Dr. Howell, M.D.**_ on her breast in cursive script, and above the name there was a button that exclaimed ' **Give Blood** ❤ **Save A Life!** '. A stethoscope hung lazily around her neck, and she discovered that focusing on it relieved the dizziness that churned within her skull.

"Are you feeling all right, honey?" Dr. Howell inquired. "You were a right mess when you came in."

She tried to speak, to ask a question, but only a dry crackling noise came out of her throat. It distorted her question into something that sounded like _'ath 'apn_ , but still, her lady doctor understood what she wanted to know. The woman hesitated for a moment, sighed, and looked her square in the eyes with a steady gaze.

"A gentleman found you by the dumpster behind a Walgreen's a few blocks from here. You're in the Fort Lauderdale Hospital."

A _hospital_. The words hit her like a stinging slap, but she forced her face to remain deadpan.

_Alone. Abandoned. Left behind._

The realization twisted her insides with grief. Her senses were dulled with pharmaceuticals, the pain that the silvery skull had inflicted upon her was too far away and she could not reach it to pull it back into herself. With him had gone those agonizing, singular sensations, the feeling of life and death; the feeling of a mutual understanding that others may have deemed to be beyond depravity. That she could no longer truly feel the pain made her want to retch.

It made her feel lifeless and hollow, unloved and unable to love. The sterile hospital room and the crisp sheets made her feel dirty even though her body had been pristinely washed, probably when she had been admitted. It all felt fundamentally _wrong_. She felt like she had been kidnapped from where she truly belonged.

Or had she been discarded?

She wanted to weep. But instead, she forced the crackle in her throat to form words at last. She needed to know if... if it had been real. If _he_ had been real.

"Who... what...?"

The doctor looked down at her hands for a few moments before replying.

"Someone left you there. You were... quite a mess. No one saw who left you there. But the police think..." —hesitation again— "...that you were kidnapped and... victimized by the serial killer who has been killing women all over Florida for quite some time. He... you... he left _marks_ on you that, ah... that leave little room for doubt. He... marks his victims. The police are baffled, you're the only person that he's ever left alive."

She started to push the covers aside to inspect her body. She had to _see_. See them, feel them, remember who gave them to her. His marks would assuage her. In their secret world of iniquity, they were the proof of his fondness of her. She _had_ to. She looked up with a silent sneer when Dr. Howell placed a warm, dry hand on her arm.

"It's probably best if you don't look at them right now," the doctor tried.

Before she had finished the last syllable, the doctor's hand had been slapped away.

She shoved the covers aside and pulled up the hospital gown. She surveyed the exquisite cuts that he had left on her. The sight of the straight, meticulous lines made her insides grow warm and alive, even when bereft of the agony that he had given her. Her eyes narrowed a little as they found some new features that must have been applied before he... _left_ her. But the new markings made her realize that he had not actually left her, not really.

A ragged breath escaped her, one of great relief, and she realized that it would be construed as distress by Dr. Howell. Good. That was good. No one would understand what they shared, so it was better to give the appearance of anguish.

There, just above her belly button, between the first vertical slashes he had ever given her, was her new name.

Sliced into the tender, pale flesh of her belly was the word

****

## u N P i G

****

screaming at her, and she knew who the pigs were and that she was not that. She felt warm and very, very pleased. She knew now that she was truly _his_. And he was truly _hers_. She knew that no matter how many whore-pigs that he slaughtered, they would never know the same intimacy that he shared with her. They wouldn't appreciate it anyway, she knew, whores that they were, shallow, dead-eyed slatterns in a world that disdained the beauty of suffering. She suppressed a horrid grin that threatened to twist her pale, chapped lips, knowing that it would be misinterpreted.

She noticed another word carved into the skin of her upper arm, and this one was an adverb, one that made her scalp prickle with horror and sick anticipation.

****

## S o o N

****

was the word, and she knew what it meant. She knew exactly what it meant. She would be ready when he came for her.

She had almost forgotten about Dr. Howell until she heard a soft sob-like gasp at her side. Puzzled, she turned to the woman. One of her smooth, dark hands with its beautifully manicured nails was clamped over her mouth and an abundance of liquid stood in her dark eyes, ready to spill at any moment.

"Oh God... Oh, my God... what did he _do_ to you?"

She realized that it was quite a valid question.

* * *

_  
Searing, exquisite pain burned in her shoulder area where she was, standing by a wall, her back tightly molded into the hard, old wood that smelled a little like Christmas trees and rotting things. There was something in her shoulder, pinning her to the wall, and it looked, to her, for all the world like an over-sized ice pick._

_She did not know that it was a trocar, an instrument used to drain corpses of bodily fluids during the embalming process. It was a handy little tool that her captor had acquired from his landlord, as it were. The old man ran his funeral home business a stone's throw away from the barn that was the skull's twisted little sanctum._

_Her hands, slick and red with her own blood, were clutching the handle in a feverish manner, but she made no move to attempt to remove it. She simply remained, hung like a side of beef, her body arching with sensation._

_The pain was spectacular and terrible like a sick cataclysm. Her body weight was almost only resting on the triangular, knife-like shaft of the instrument. Her tiptoes were barely scraping the floor, shuffling straw and bits of debris about where they reached. She sobbed deeply with the agony of it, tears drying taut on her face only for new ones to follow._

_She called for him to come to her. She wasn't begging him for an end to the pain. Rather, she was imploring him to make it continue, give her more, hurt her with his blades, with his body, hurt her however he liked. Her body was undulating with excitement. She found herself wondering if this was to be his new game. To watch her suffer, to hear her desperate cries as she called for him. Wanting—needing—his body to hurt her again. If it was, she decided, him denying her would be more cruel than anything she had ever known._

* * *

_He watched his unpig from the shadows as she squirmed on the trocar. She was begging him to come to her, to give her more of what she desired so badly. The dark thing in him grunted in reluctant appreciation at the fondness that the unpig had for their work. It told him that it would always, always want her butchered. It would always want her dead and splashed with blood, the pale skin glistening red. Always. But he and the darkness were one and the same, it realized this, and it knew that he had found a rare commodity in the unpig. One that he would not part with._

_The darkness had washed its hands of it, but they both knew that when he caressed her flesh with steel and she greedily soaked up everything they gave her with pleased, haunted moans, never asking for an end to it, only more, more, more hurt... they both knew that the dark thing was pleased in a way it had never been before._

_He did not know how much longer he could abstain from unpig. He needed her so very badly when she hurt and bled and begged for more. He regarded her from the darkness where he sat with the head of the redhead whore-pig in his lap. He was absently stroking the shiny, auburn tresses, the wavy, chic hairstyle still rather undisturbed even though he had carved the whore's spinal cord in two while her body jerked and convulsed in a manner that would have struck any other person as utterly obscene, but only struck him as obscenely entertaining._

_With remarkable precision, he had shoved the shiny trocar into his unpig's shoulder, making sure to avoid both her clavicle and shoulder blade in the process. He suspected that the sensation of the stainless steel in the small space between her bones would prove very entertaining. For both of them._

_How she loved the pain._

_How she loved the pain that only he could give her._

_And with that, he tossed the dead whore's head aside and charged at his unpig. He was upon her swiftly, she was moaning and sobbing, clothed only in blood, desire and agony. He grabbed her wrists with one hand, forcing them over her head and ignoring her wails as the instrument in her shoulder scraped against bone._

_She was so fucking beautiful when she was suffering._

_Her legs were jerking and her toes twitching frantically, trying to find stable ground. He granted her some respite, hooking one of her legs over his clothed hip. He noted with barely contained excitement that the junction between her soft thighs was slick and swollen, so ready was she for him to torment her again._

_And so the blade was in his gloved hand._

* * *

_Yes, oh yes.... please, yes!_

_There it was, the gorgeous, lethal blade that had kissed her skin so many times, its silvery flashing almost hypnotic, promising more, more of the hurt, the delicious hurt that made her feel alive, beyond life, a little nucleus of suffering in a white-hot universe created by one of the most pure, fundamental physical sensations that every living creature could experience._

_For a few moments, he tenderly stroked her face and thumbed her lips before his hands strayed elsewhere. He gripped her soft thigh, lifting it up and opening her nether regions for his use. The cool handle of one of his knives pushed against her, the steel knuckles adorning the handle stretching her aching opening. He roughly thrust the handle of the knife into her, and she heard him exhale with pleasure behind the mask. She could feel that the handle was slightly warm from his gloved hands. He could only continue this ministration for a few moments before she came, her pale body convulsing with rapture. Fields of crackling stars dappled her vision as the climax in her ravaged her abused body. Knowing the possibility that at any moment, he could shove the blade into her throat and watch as she died was beyond frightening. But also beyond thrilling._

_When the sparkling before her eyes abated, the skull was in front of her, a low, nearly inaudible groan in his throat as he softly thrust the handle of his blade into her throbbing heat a few more times, almost as an afterthought, before withdrawing it completely._

_And before she could beg for him to allow her to do so, he forced her to lick the handle clean._

_Then he released her hands and they fell onto his shoulders as he gripped her waist with a vice-like grasp. There was a crisp shuffle of starched fabric, and the sound of a hastily undone zipper._

_Then he was fucking her with his monstrous flesh, impaling her on it again and again, one hand periodically tugging her hair, forcing his fingers into her throat so that she could taste the blood of his whores. She suckled at them greedily. Sometimes his hand would close around one of her small breasts, crushing the soft, pale flesh until it swelled between the black, rubber-clad fingers._

_When he finished inside her, he growled. The sound was not one she had ever heard from him before. A deep, nearly inhuman noise reverberated in her body as he filled her with his seed. The sound tickled her body, sending her tumbling into another pain-laced climax. She relished the sensations, but her body was fast approaching unconsciousness due to what it perceived as trauma._

_As her vision started to cloud, she felt her captor wrench himself out of her swollen, raw flesh. He did so with a low, pleased chuckle, the first she had ever heard him utter. He yanked the trocar out of her shoulder, and she collapsed listlessly into his arms. The last thing she knew was the sting of a hypodermic needle in her neck and his rubber-clad fingers stroking her tangled hair._

* * *

She glanced up at the lovely, dark lady doctor at her side. Dr. Howell's black eyes were brimming with horror and sympathy as she waited for her to explain what had happened to her.

She knew that she could never explain what she found in that barn, even if she had tried. She could not explain what the silvery skull had found in _her_. She knew very well that the devotion that she and the skull held for one another would not be well understood. So she opted to play the part of a victim as best as she could.

She assumed what she hoped was a pained, tormented expression. She pulled her gown down again and yanked the covers back in their place. She said nothing, simply hung her head and secretly counted the corners of the generic geometric pattern that adorned the coverlet.

"I am...so, _so_ sorry, sweetheart," came a whisper from the doctor.

Her soft, dark hands patted her hair for a moment. A loudspeaker in the hallway started to rattle, calling Dr. Howell to the ICU. The doctor took a last look at her, and pointed to a button on the wall by the bed.

"Call the nurses if you need anything," she said, "I will be back to check on you later."

Soft footsteps, cushioned by sneakers, padded out of the room.

As soon as she was alone, she threw back the coverlets and hopped out of the bed. A bit of vertigo hit her then, and her damaged and sutured skin protested against the movement. She noticed that the burn of her wounds was so far away, lost in the haze of drugs, but still, the pain called to her. She staggered unsteadily to the adjoining bathroom, locking the door. The bathroom smelled of disinfectant. She stripped off the monochromatic hospital gown, staring at herself in the mirror above the sink.

She craned her neck and strained to see everything he had left her with.

A perfectly straight line of crusted, healing dots trailed across the pale column of her throat.

Symmetrical wounds started beneath both of her breasts, curving inwards at her waist and joining just above her belly button, and beneath them, her skin was marked with her new name.

A number of more haphazard cuts in different stages of healing traversed the front of her body, and she wasn't quite sure when he had bestowed those upon her. She liked to imagine that he had given her those when _inside_ of her, losing himself in their shared passion and cutting indiscriminately. It was like the difference between cubist and abstract art; vastly different in style but done with emotion and skill.

She touched her back as much as she was able, trying to let her fingers see what her eyes could not. Oh yes, there were many cuts there, as well. The scabs of the healing cuts felt like little barbed things in comparison to the unmarred skin.

Meticulously, she started to scratch the scabs off of her wounds. Beads of blood started to well as she bared the lacerations anew.

Soon all of the cuts that she could reach were glistening red again and crusty bits of scabs littered the pale green linoleum at her feet.

She studied her reflection for a long time, admiring her work. In time, the scars would darken and deepen considerably if she kept picking at them. She did not want them to heal cleanly. They were her only visual mementoes, after all.

The brilliant string of scarlet around her neck was now liberated again. The wounds were filling in with fat drops of blood and resembled a most exquisite strand of fine maroon pearls. She touched her index finger to one carefully, and found that the blood had already started to coagulate.

And then she wept hysterically, wailing like a demented, injured animal until her sobs tapered off and the room grew silent again.

And then she smiled.

In her mouth she tasted sawdust.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few lines in this twisted tale are homages to other unhinged things that I am fond of. Here's a small list of them.
> 
>  **1.** "Married to the pain" is a line snatched from a song called mOBSCENE by Marilyn Manson.
> 
>  
> 
>  **2.** "In her mouth she tasted sawdust" is a homage to Stephen King's novel, Carrie (1974). The main character's (quite insane) mother prepares to murder her daughter.
>
>>   
>  _She sat down on the high stool by the counter, found the sliver of whetstone in its small aluminum dish, and began to scrub it along the gleaming edge of the blade with the apathetic, fixated attention of the damned._   
>  _The Black Forest Cuckoo Clock ticked and ticked and finally the bird jumped out to call once and announce eight-thirty._   
>  _In her mouth she tasted olives._   
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  **3.** "The oak came from England" is another homage to Stephen King and his novel Misery (1987). The main character of the book remembers a bird that he saw in a zoo as a child. His mother explains to him that "that bird came from Africa". Similarly, it's a thought that stays with the main character throughout the novel.
>
>>   
>  _Africa.That bird came from Africa. But you mustn't cry for that bird, Paulie, because after a while it forgot about how the veldt smelled at noonday, and the sounds of the wildebeests at the waterhole, and the high acidic smell of the ieka-ieka trees in the great clearing north of the big road. After awhile it forgot the cerise color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro. After awhile it only knew the muddy, smogged-out sunsets of Boston, that was all it remembered and all it wanted to remember. After awhile it didn't want to go back anymore, and if someone took it back and set it free it would only crouch in one place, afraid and hurting and homesick in two unknown and terribly ineluctable directions until something came along and killed it._   
> 


End file.
